


The Serpent's Gift

by ancientreader



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Wild Hunt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-24 13:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8374459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: A wounded soldier dreams of the Wild Hunt. Written for the 2016 Spook Me! ficathon, for the creature prompt "beast."





	

**Author's Note:**

> The tale of the Wild Hunt appears in many European cultures (and perhaps in others with whose lore I'm not familiar). A Norse version is described [here](http://norse-mythology.org/the-wild-hunt/), and TV Tropes's general discussion is [here](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWildHunt).
> 
> Many many thanks to my beta-reading dream team, [TSylvestris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/profile) (who gets a special shout-out for being well-informed with respect to vulpine vibrissae, a subject surprisingly difficult to Google usefully), [Frikshun](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Frikshun/profile), and [Chryse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Chryse/profile), who simultaneously encourage me and save me from all manner of idiocy both great and small. (Psst: they're _really nice people!_ )

 

Many years ago, in a faraway land, there was a brave soldier.

He lay on a narrow cot in a tent where the air stank of wounds that had gone foul, and of shit. He was one of about — depending on how many had died overnight, and how many more had arrived — two dozen. Some of them never stirred. Some of them twisted this way and that, clutching at the rough sheets that covered them. Women went among the cots offering all the comfort available: cool cloths, and laudanum. Swish, swish was the sound of the women’s dresses, but you could scarcely hear it amid the stertorous breathing and the gasps of men trying to conceal their pain, amid the gasps and sobs of men who were past such false dignity and only hoped to live, or not to.

In the stinking tent that housed so much pain, the soldier named John Watson lay fevered and near death, and he was dreaming. He found himself in a landscape of black earth and sharp black trees in moonlight. He stood by the side of a great empty road, waiting, as one might wait for the stage to arrive; but there was no stage; and still he waited, watching the road. He did not understand how he knew to watch in one direction and not the other, but he watched . . . Hours passed, silently, and still John Watson watched the empty silent road.

At last he felt, through his booted feet (but was he not lying in a tent, barefoot and naked?), the slightest of vibrations, like the roar of a distant tide; then the tide drew in, closer and closer, until the black earth rumbled beneath him. Until the earth seemed to rise and plunge like ocean. Surely, he thought, he ought to hide, but there was nowhere to hide; the dream trees had vanished and he stood exposed upon the plain. There were no colors in the moonlight.

The riders came on fast. He could not flee. Their hounds ran ahead of them, red-eyed; their horses had eyes of flame; he tried to see the riders but could make out only cloaked forms. Perhaps it was just as well he could not see their faces, he thought. He shook with terror, or else with the fever of the other world that he was so near leaving.

The red-eyed hounds howled past him, dark against the dark earth, with the moon glinting off their backs; the horses drove past him and he saw that their hooves never touched the thundering earth. A horn sounded. “I am in the land of Faerie,” John Watson told himself. What poor creature were they hunting, those cloaked riders?

Then the hooves, the horn, the baying red-eyed hounds were gone, and John Watson stood once again beside an empty silent road, on a dark plain, in the moonlight.

In the hospital tent someone placed a cool cloth over John Watson’s forehead, and he stirred.

*

His fever declined all that day; but in the evening it rose again.

*

He stood beside the empty silent road. The moon, having been full the night before, should have begun its decline, but it rose full again, and the road lay silver before him. He watched along it, expecting at any moment to hear the Wild Hunt, but there was nothing; and then nothing; until, at last, just as the ground began to tremble, there, black against the moonlight, was a raven turning cartwheels in the air, at play.

Now John Watson could see the riders in the distance, coming faster and faster, the dust rising up around their horses’ hooves that never touched the ground. The raven seemed to hesitate in the air just ahead of John, and in that instant he saw the lead rider raise his bow. The horn sounded. The rider’s arrow struck its mark; the raven dropped to the bare road. Soon the red-eyed hounds would be on her.

 _No,_ said John Watson in his dream, and he leaped into the hounds’ path. He could smell their close breath as he dove for the roadside with the wounded raven cradled to his breast; _Now the Hunt will turn on me,_ he thought: for he seemed to see the archer look toward him as the riders drove by, and there came the sound of the horn.

But the Hunt went on away.

John stood up, carefully, and brought his wrist where the raven could grasp it. How strange, he thought as she settled herself and fluffed her feathers, that the arrow seemed to have passed right through her and that she had not been killed. Carefully he opened one wing, then the other, meaning to discover the wound and perhaps bind it with a torn piece of his shirt. How fine and soft she was to the touch, how warm the muscle of her broad wings. Metacarpus, radius, ulna, humerus: all intact. The raven neither struggled nor pecked at him, only turned her head to watch his moving hand and his face. John thought what damage she might do with her great beak; _Hush,_ he said to her, though she made no sound. He had not said _Hush_ with his voice, either, though he didn’t notice this.

Not so much as a broken black feather did John find: no wound. Her plumage shimmered with a thousand fragments of moonlight. Around her and John, a breeze began to lift; the raven lowered her head, drew her body forward, and spread her wings. _Keep my gift,_ she said. _You will have need of it one day._ She circled John once, twice, thrice; and was gone.

*

The morning grayed and brightened, and as day came on John’s fever dropped. _What a beautiful bird,_ he thought as he awoke. That afternoon he felt a little better than he had in some time, so he asked one of the kind women for an envelope in which to put the blue-black feather he had found underneath his pillow. He put the envelope in his rucksack and, his energies exhausted, went back to bed.

*

In the evening, once again, his fever rose.

*

Down the wild road, a fox, eyes moon-reflecting white with terror — _You ought to be bolting for your den,_ John thought — ears pinned, plunging forward, then staggering, already torn, bloodgleam spatters soaking into the earth, and the hounds close on him; and John, not understanding his own impulse ( _chicken killers, vermin_ ), whistled as he might whistle up his dog —

The fox wheeled and leapt.

Was in John’s arms.

The fox was hot and stinking and the blood from his wounds slick on John’s hands. The hounds, too, wheeled now, panting. Silent. He should have heard their panting, but there was only his own heart and the fox’s harsh breath. John braced — the hounds would tear him apart with the fox now — why didn’t he let go? why didn’t he let go? he held the fox to his bosom, blood soaking into his shirt, and looked steady back at the hounds’ red eyes; they were so close to where he stood at the road’s edge with the fox in his arms, he should have felt their wet breath on his skin but there was nothing — silence; silence, and then the hunters’ horn, and the hounds turned again and were gone down the empty road, the riders after them.

John set the fox down on the moon-tipped grass of the roadside and looked at him. The fox rested on his haunches and looked back at John. Fox grin. The blood had vanished; the fox’s untorn flanks were smooth. John turned his hands over and over: they should have been sticky with blood, but they were as clean as the fox’s black-tipped coat. He reached down and stroked the fox along his back. Along his right side. Along his left side. The fox sat up, lifting his lip — _Here you may not touch_ — and showed his shining clean belly.

_How?_

But the fox was a shadow and then gone. _Keep my gift; you will have need of it someday._

*

Night fell away and John’s fever dropped. Under his pillow when he woke lay a single curved black whisker, so fine he might easily have brushed it onto the dirty floor without noticing, yet so sharp-tipped it drew a prick of blood from his finger. He tucked it into the envelope with the feather, and hid all away in his rucksack again.

He felt strong enough to venture outside the tent. There was a bench under a tree that overlooked the road by which the wounded came. He hadn’t been aware of it when he himself was brought, of course, but he thought somehow he might recognize it — that it might be the road from his fever dream.

But it was not. He sat and watched until he felt the ache in his bones that meant the fever was coming on.

*

Again the black empty road shining. John realized with a start that in his waking life, weeks — but how many weeks? — had passed since he last saw the moon. Full, new, crescent: he had no idea. He watched, shifting from foot to foot; for the first time, he felt the cold, as if the year were declining even in this place where the moon didn’t change. He shivered; his teeth chattered, and the chattering became the distant sound of hooves, till once more the Wild Hunt drove toward him. The hounds bayed, their red eyes intent on the ground ahead; the flame-eyed horses shook the untouched earth, and the hooded riders turned —

But John did not shrink back. He made himself stand straight though he shuddered under the riders’ empty gaze. The horses thundered on.

They had no prey this night, John thought; but then saw that he was wrong. On the road a serpent writhed. _Evil, venomous, wise_. At the moment, also suffering. John bit his lip and took up the snake. _How did they trample you, when they don’t touch the ground?_ Under the moon, the snake’s blood looked black. _It’s red,_ said the snake.

_You know my mind._

_You’re not afraid?_ The serpent coiled around John’s arm, a long muscle lacing itself to him. Inquisitive, he stroked it, noticed the small roughnesses of its scales under his palm. The serpent was pleasantly firm, cool and dry. It raised itself to look into his face.

 _I thought I would be afraid, but no. I’m not._ The blood had vanished and the snake was whole again; John was no longer surprised by this.

The snake put out its tongue, testing. John didn’t move, except for the hand with which he caressed the coils around his arm.

_By the way, I’m not venomous._

_That’s a relief._

_I’m a constrictor._ The coils around John’s arm tightened, barely, then relaxed. A snake joke! John laughed. Ran a finger down the serpent’s throat, scratched lightly at the smoother, lighter-colored scales there.

The serpent moved. Up John’s arm, over his left shoulder, drawing itself over the wound — _Painless,_ John registered with surprise — over his nape, and down the other side, dropping to the grass and, like the raven and the fox, gone.

_Keep my gift, and someday you may find you don’t need it._

*

When John awoke, his fever was gone. The scale he found under his pillow was the size of a plectrum, dull black, flexible, tipped with iridescence at the narrow end. He turned it this way and that to catch the light, then wrapped it in a scrap of bandage he begged from the nurse who came to dress his wound, and put it in the envelope with the other gifts. A feather, a whisker, a scale . . .

He spent part of the day on the bench overlooking the road. Weeks had passed since more wounded had been brought in: the war was over, someone had won it, there would be a new ruler or there would not. Soon, perhaps, the road would see farm carts, travelers’ carriages, the coach that bore the mail. In the afternoon John took his cane and walked for a while, aimlessly, passing between sun and shade and wondering where he might go and what he might do. His fever did not return, nor did the dreams, that evening or the next or the next; he spent some weeks helping the nurses tend the last of the wounded, and when finally the paymaster counted out the coin he was owed for his service he took up his cane and his rucksack and turned his steps toward the city.

*

Life went well enough, John supposed. The room he had found was smallish and darkish, overlooking as it did an alley rather than the street, but it was cheap. His weeks with the nurses had taught him how to clean a wound, change a dressing, mop a brow: he found a place with a physician. He liked the work — didn’t mind the smells, had the knack of working gentle-quick so as to cause less pain — would have liked to be a physician himself, he thought, but who would have an apprentice as old as he, with a weak hand at that? On his free days he sat in the best light he could find and doggedly, biting his lip, swearing in frustration at the hundredth, the two hundredth, the five hundredth futile attempt, taught himself to thread a needle in reverse, with his left hand tucked against his breast to steady it and his right hand bringing the thread in close. Even to keep the thread between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand was difficult: he had always used his left hand for fine work, before. When he could thread the needle on the first try nine times out of ten, he bought himself a piece of fine supple leather and a whetstone to sharpen needles with, and taught his right hand to sew. It went easier than threading the needle had done. “So I have educated you,” he said to his hand, in pleased surprise. He was mostly alone when not at work and had formed the habit of speaking aloud.

So now John could clean, stitch, dress, and bandage a wound. It was not nothing — he was useful, and also the physician began to pay him more. But sometimes he sat at the window in his smallish darkish room, remembering the war — but it was good that the war was over — and the dreams that had come to him with his fevers. He began to think that the raven’s feather, the fox’s whisker, and the serpent’s scale had come to him by earthly chance, not from that other world. Nevertheless, he kept them.

*

When John tired of evenings spent wondering what had become of his life, he walked. From one of the crumbling warrens where the poorest lived, and the smells of rotten cabbage, river water, night soil crowded the air because the streets were never cleaned, you could pass in the space of a few minutes to a quarter busy with louche establishments — places where the sap of poppies could be bought, or women, or for that matter men — and thence, in a few minutes more, to a grandly lighted boulevard along which sleek horses bore their even sleeker riders toward entertainments John could only imagine, as he could never afford to attend them: formal balls, with velvet-and-silk-clad dancers cutting geometrical figures over polished marble floors; performances by esteemed instrumentalists, the audience silent in awe; sumptuous meals, course after course after course of terrapin and lark and suckling pig —

“It's exactly as dull as you suspect it is,” said a voice in John's ear.

John turned. _Oh —_

“Although some of the food is passable, I suppose.”

“You were — ” John began, and stopped himself from saying _in my dreams_ , because that wasn’t right. A raven, a fox, a serpent. Not a man, at all. Not a man — “How do you know I suspect it’s dull?” he said.

A little of the delight had withdrawn from the stranger’s expression. (Why had there been delight, why was John sorry to see it go?) The stranger said: “You don’t look envious in the least, to begin with. And you stand like a soldier — but no, that’s not it. Not every soldier’s suited to that life. You _were_ suited to it. And now . . . ” The man gazes into John. “Well. You might as well wear a placard bearing the words ‘I am desperately bored.’”

A long time had passed since John had been, to anyone but himself, more than whatever function he served or what condition he was in. What lived inside him began to lift and uncurl. “You — ” he began, intending to say _You can’t possibly know those things_ (and within him his real voice rejoiced, for _You know me you know me you_ know _me_ ) but —

“Well, _that’s_ inconvenient,” said the stranger, for someone had shouted, “There he is, boys!”

“Or maybe not,” the stranger went on, still looking at John.

“Not?” John said.

“Feeling venturous? Best come quick, in that case,” and the stranger seized John’s hand, and ran.

An alley, a startled tavern full of smoke, through the kitchen with a woman’s voice shouting after them “Leg it, Sherlock!” and then, heard faintly because they were already out the back door and halfway up a ladder to the adjacent building’s roof, “Who’s your new friend?” On the roof they caught their breath; then — Sherlock? — peered over the edge and tsked. “Still venturous? Good” — which turned out to be because they’d been followed too closely to lose their pursuers, who were even now to be seen surmounting the two buildings that bracketed the roof where John and Sherlock stood. There were four of them, and they had knives.

John eyed them. “Shame I’m not armed.”

Sherlock glanced at him. “Oh?”

“No, I — ” John patted at his sides, meaning to demonstrate the lack of any holder of handy sharp objects there, and found —

— a belt, with a scabbard, and in the scabbard a black slender knife.

“Why are they chasing you?” John asked. The knife sang in his hand. . . .

. . . and in the next moment the attackers had vanished, the roof had vanished, Sherlock had vanished, and John was looking down the moonlight road of his fever dreams; he thought he could hear hoofbeats, fading, and hounds baying, far away. He was alone.

*

John awoke with the knife at his right hand. _But it was in my left hand, last night,_ he thought, which was easier than thinking about how he had apparently brought a knife back with him from his dreams. He sat on the side of his bed in the morning light and studied the engraving on the black blade: a feather, worked in detail so fine he could make out the individual strands of down at the base of the quill. Suppose he had touched Sherlock’s black hair, would it have been as soft as the feathers on a raven’s breast?

The thought discomfited him.

John got up and opened his rucksack to find the envelope he had brought with him from the hospital tent. The whisker and the scale remained.

 _Why are they chasing you?_ he had asked; the answer, half heard, was drifting into vapor, but he snatched at the memory, and caught.

_Because they must._

He set the feather knife in its sheath and buckled it on; then he went to assist the physician, as usual. Only when his employer said, “Where’s your cane?” did John realize that it, along with his limp, was gone.

*

When John had lain in the tent, feverish, after he took the shoulder wound, his dreams had been simply what came; he neither wanted nor didn’t want them, more or less as he neither wanted nor didn’t want anything else. He had accepted the raven’s feather, the fox’s whisker, and the serpent’s scale in the same way, without questioning them or marveling over them.

Last night he had asked only the one question, though many others came to mind: _Who are you, really? Who are your pursuers? Where is that place the Wild Hunt drives by?_ Now he had another to add to those: _How do I get back there, to that place so much like my city, but that is where you are?_

And the most important question:

_Are you safe?_

*

The stuff of John’s days took on a translucency — he felt he could, if he looked hard enough, see through to a doubled world behind every stone, every gateway, every wall. A wooden door, painted green, with a transom of green glass overhead: did it not have an air of mystery, somehow?

A laundress, bristling, straightened from her steaming tub and glared at him.

There was a passage he had never noticed before, narrow, making a dogleg just where the shadows of buildings grew deep. _What if, what if_ —

_Right. What if you walk straight into the front room of a bawdyhouse, that’s what._

Night after night John stood beside the avenue where Sherlock had first spoken in his ear; he watched the carriages and the velvet-clad riders pass by, and through the cries of the footmen, the ringing of hooves against cobblestones, the ceaseless tumult of the homeward crowds that jostled him, he listened and listened for that voice.

Weeks passed. John made himself stop going to watch the carriages; when a door or an alleyway seemed to promise secrets, he forced himself to turn away. He told himself he must not be disappointed. He had had a marvelous adventure — several extraordinary dreams, and the gift of the black-bladed feather knife, the most dangerous and beautiful thing he had ever owned. His limp hadn’t returned. As for the _not raven not fox not serpent not longed-for_ man, he was a phantasm. He was to be forgotten.

John turned from end of day to beginning of day, beginning of day to end of day, the days a series of cages, each cage like the one before it; he lay in his narrow bed waiting for sleep, hoping to dream, looking up at the ceiling or out his one window, through which he could sometimes see the moon.

*

In the ragged hours of the night, John Watson sprang awake, listening. There was nothing to hear, and then a gasp, the flat thump of fists against flesh, a body falling. The back alley was empty: where had the sounds come from, then? And no one else in the house had been roused, it seemed. John buckled on his knife, meaning to take himself downstairs — but there, leaning against the corridor wall next to John’s door and bent to hold back the blood streaming from his thigh —

“I’d clasp your hand in greeting,” Sherlock said, “but as you see I’ve no hand to spare.” He shuddered; John caught him up before he slid to the floor, hauled him into his room, and arranged him on the bed.

For an otherworldly being, Sherlock weighed a great deal. His heart beat solidly. But blood had left a trail behind him and now it began to soak John’s bed. John wrapped his thigh with a rag to stanch the wound, and considered what to do next. He had nothing but his needle and coarse thread: no proper bandages, nothing with which to ease the pain of stitching . . .

Only, by the bedside stood a satchel such as a physician might use. Bandages; a flask of clean water; a velvet-lined case for half a dozen fine needles, scissors, and a whetstone; a spool of white silk. A separate case with stoppered bottles: spirits for disinfection; elixirs for cough, for fever, for pain. Sherlock, more alert now that he wasn’t struggling to keep himself upright, smiled at John. “Give me the willow bark,” he said. “Mistress Poppy and I had rather a long romance, and still feel the strain of parting.”

*

Sherlock was made of flesh like any man: he bit his lips and breathed hard through his nose as John took stitch on stitch. Afterward John tidied up, fearing to look away in case Sherlock should vanish again, but Sherlock remained. John said, hesitantly, “Fresh bedding”; Sherlock shifted over to show him the ticking and blanket, clean.

“Well.” John sat in the space Sherlock had made. “You’re . . . an enchanted laundress, then?”

Sherlock took his hand. “Not quite.”

“Where — ”

“No,” Sherlock said.

“You should stay,” John said. “Keep off that leg while it heals. Can you — ”

“I can stay,” Sherlock answered. His right hand had come to rest against the side of John’s neck.

“Stay,” John said, and kissed him.

“For a while.”

Sherlock’s voice was just more than a whisper, so John could imagine he had not heard.

 

*

Sherlock’s hair was as black and soft as the feathers on a raven’s breast, his eyes as bright as a fox’s eyes; he was as clever as a serpent, and he was tricky (like raven, like fox, like serpent). His kisses laid a trail of fever over John’s skin and he offered himself up shameless to John’s hands and John’s prick. He pressed John to himself and fucked him slowly, and under Sherlock John whimpered. John hid his face in Sherlock’s shoulder and Sherlock hushed him and poured kisses over him like water. John rested against Sherlock and thought _ocean of white flowers._ Thought _midnight sky._ Thought _my love, my own, my darling love._ He tried to watch till dawn, but he fell asleep for a moment or maybe only looked away, and when he turned back, with the morning all around him, Sherlock was gone.

 _For a while,_ John reminded himself. _You knew what to expect, because he told you. For a while._

The day passed wearily. Hope leaped in him whenever the bell rang over the physician’s door, but Sherlock didn’t come. _He wouldn’t come by daylight, anyway._ John sought him _raven fox serpent_ in every face he passed that evening; he sat looking out of his window for a while, trying to think how he might find Sherlock again, and at last laid himself heartsore to sleep.

*

A crescent moon hung in John’s window, and someone had spoken his name. “You — Where did you go?” he said, winding his fist in Sherlock’s hair. He rolled Sherlock over and straddled him. “Where?”

Sherlock shook his head.

“You can’t tell me.”

“No,” Sherlock said. “I can’t tell you.”

“And you can’t stay.”

Sherlock touched John’s mouth. He laid the palm of his hand against John’s cheek. John felt an unbearable sadness enter his small room and crouch there, waiting. Sherlock closed his eyes and said, so softly John could just hear: “I can stay for a while.”

“Then stay for a while,” John said.

*

Evening by evening, night by night, the crescent moon grew toward the full, and night by night Sherlock lay with John in the narrow bed. John’s employer rallied him: “My friend, I see you’re dull of a morning but you brighten with the afternoon. You’ve got someone at home, then, have you? And eager to get back to her?”

John laughed at this and shook his head. “Caught me,” he said. _My own, my love, my heart,_ he thought. He never spoke such words to Sherlock, because Sherlock was only staying _for a while_ and wouldn’t wish to hear them.

*

The moon had passed the full, and Sherlock was —

Something was wrong with Sherlock. He appeared in John’s bed just as he had been doing, every night, but John had, more and more, an impression of weariness, like that of a traveler who has come a great distance, arduously. Sherlock might lie for an hour at a time with John’s hand pressed to his heart and his eyes closed, talking aimlessly. On the night of the half moon, a trembling seized him, only for a few moments, but the next night it came again. And again the night after, and again. As the moon waned, John gave him every elixir in the physician’s satchel, to no avail.

Sherlock burned with fever.

John begged of his employer: did he know of rare medicaments to be had anywhere, anywhere at all? But the eminent physicians his employer named shook their heads regretfully and could not help.

The night of the quarter moon, Sherlock cried out in his delirium; wide-eyed, he gripped John’s shoulder and whispered, “You see, it’s just as I knew it would be,” then fell back, panting like an animal pursued.

 _I can keep him with me if I watch,_ John thought. _Surely, if I watch, he will stay._ But no matter how he struggled, sleep always came for him before the dawn; in the morning, Sherlock was always gone. And every night he seemed less substantial than the night before.

As the moon outside his window shrank toward darkness, John thought of the road he had visited in his own fever dreams. _What poor creature were they hunting, those cloaked riders?_ So he had wondered then. He fetched the feather knife, the physician’s satchel, and the envelope that still held the serpent’s gift. One night remained till the new moon. Sherlock would die, and John would be left with a finely worked knife, a satchel of physician’s gear, and one black scale from a snake.

_He doesn’t need your knife, John Watson._

John looked up: the raven was perched on Sherlock’s motionless wrist.

_What does he need, then? Tell me._

A black curl stirred, as if touched by the breeze of a beating wing.

_He doesn’t need your medicines, John Watson._

The fox was tucked against Sherlock’s heaving side.

 _Help me,_ John said. _I saved you. Help me._

 _You must think of what’s left,_ the fox replied.

What was left! Nothing that John could use, surely. He unwrapped the scrap of bandage that held the serpent’s scale, and turned it over and over. Sherlock’s breathing was labored; a week ago he had whispered, “You see, it’s just as I knew it would be,” and since then John had not heard him speak.

 _You told me you weren’t afraid of me, John Watson._ The serpent wound itself up onto Sherlock’s breast and raised its head to look at John.

_I don’t understand._

_You weren’t afraid to die in battle. You’re not afraid of me. You were steadfast before the Wild Hunt._ _What frightens you more than the Wild Hunt, John Watson? What frightens you more than your own death?_

Sherlock’s breaths were coming slow and shallow now.

John looked again at the scale. _This could be a shield._

_Yes, it could._

The figure on the bed was utterly still.

_You said to keep this. You said someday I might find I didn’t need it._

_Yes._

_Need it! I don’t_ want _it. What good is it to me, when —_

John understood.

He called Sherlock’s name. Over and over he called it. _I love you,_ he called to Sherlock, and _my_ _ocean of white flowers, my midnight sky, my own, my darling, my love;_ out of John, borne on the sound of his grief, poured the gift of his finally unshielded heart.

*

For such a long time, John had been watching the silent empty moonlit road; now, at last, toward him a man came running. The man had hair as black as a raven’s wing and eyes as bright as a fox’s, and he was nearly spent; he stumbled and caught himself, then stumbled again and fell; he brought himself to his feet, with what effort John could see. The man’s breath heaved with terror; even by moonlight, even at a distance, John could see the weary and frightened sweat pour from him. He knew the man’s name somehow, and he called it, but now the Wild Hunt was upon them and there was nothing to do.

John cast aside everything but love. He took Sherlock in his arms.

*

The hounds of the Wild Hunt snarled and bayed, and the horses drove fast behind them, shaking the earth. The cloaked riders sought their prey.

*

The last thin moon had set and the sky was just coming gray; a breeze had set up. 

Sherlock opened his eyes. He laid his palm against John Watson’s cheek and kissed him into the morning.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have a bee in my bonnet about the common fanfic trope in which Sherlock is denied pain relief because he used to use coke/heroin/whatever, so I would like to stress that here, Sherlock's assessing his own vulnerabilities and making his own choice when he asks John to use willow bark.* 
> 
> John's serpent resembles a [Speckled Kingsnake](http://www.reptilescanada.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=20846&d=1359512420). Gorgeous, eh?
> 
> *Who am I kidding? The truth is, I couldn't resist giving him that line about Mistress Poppy. Um.


End file.
